Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible for your data

RealScout (realscout.uk) is operated by Matera Capital Limited, which is the data controller for any personal data processed through this website. You can reach us at contact@materacapital.com.

2. What the product asks you for

RealScout has no user accounts and no sign-up, and it asks you for nothing in order to show you a figure. Anything you type into the search tool (such as a postcode) is used to look up statistics and is not linked to your identity by us.

There is one place where you can choose to send us something, and it is entirely optional: the feedback panel described in the next section.

3. Feedback you send us

Every page carries a Send feedback button in the bottom corner. It opens a panel with one required field, your message, and one optional field, your email address. Nothing leaves your browser until you press Send.

When you send a message, we receive:

• Your message, as you typed it.
• Your email address, only if you chose to give one. We use it to reply to you about that message, and for nothing else. It goes on no list and we send no marketing. Leave the field empty and the message still reaches us.
• Which page you were on: its address and title, which part of the site it belongs to, and the area it was about.
• How you got to it: the page or site you followed a link from, if there was one. For anywhere outside RealScout this is only the site’s address and never the individual page, because our referrer policy tells your browser not to send more than that. If you arrived from a search engine, we do not receive what you searched for.
• How the page was being viewed: your browser and its version, your operating system, whether the device is a phone, tablet or computer, the size of the window and its pixel density, your browser’s language, the identification string your browser sends with every request it makes to any site, and the version of the dataset on screen.
• When you sent it: the time it reached our server, your device’s own clock and time zone, and how long the panel had been open.
• Roughly where you are: whatever our host is able to derive from your IP address, which in practice is a country and a time zone, and sometimes also an approximate region and city. It is a guess, it is never finer than a city, it is never an address, and it is often simply wrong: a VPN or a mobile network will place you wherever the connection surfaces. Where our host offers nothing, we record nothing and infer nothing. We also do not ask your device where it is: the site blocks the browser geolocation permission outright, on every page, so it cannot.

Your IP address itself is never recorded. It is used at the moment you press Send, to limit how many messages one sender can submit and to notice a duplicate. A short numeric fingerprint of it stays in the server’s working memory for up to a day so those two checks can work, and that is all: the address is not written into the email, not written to disk, and not stored anywhere we could read it back.

Where it goes. The panel sends this to our own server, which composes a single email and sends it to contact@materacapital.com, the address published on our contact page. Your browser never sends the email itself. Delivery is handled on our behalf by Resend, our email provider, which processes it on servers in the United States under its standard data-processing terms. The message is then held in our mailbox, which runs on Google Workspace.

Nothing is written to a database, because this site has none: the email is the only copy. If it cannot be delivered, the panel tells you so rather than claiming it arrived, and the failure is recorded in our server logs, with the message, so that it can be recovered. Otherwise we keep feedback in the mailbox for as long as it is useful, and delete it on request.

Our lawful basis is legitimate interest in running and correcting the service. Giving an email address is you choosing to be contacted about your message; ask us not to and we will not. If you have accepted analytics cookies (see below), Google Analytics also records that a message was sent: it receives no part of the message, and never your email address.

Please do not send confidential information, or personal data about anyone else, through the panel. It is a note about a website.

4. Analytics

We use two analytics tools, and they work differently. One sets cookies and asks your permission first; the other sets no cookies and collects no personal data, so it needs no permission.

Vercel Web Analytics (no cookies, always on)

To count how many people visit and which pages are read, we use Vercel Web Analytics. It sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device, and does not collect personal data or any identifier that could follow you between sites or visits: it produces aggregate counts only. Because it neither stores anything on your device nor processes personal data about you, it does not require consent, so it runs for every visitor and is not covered by the cookie banner. Vercel processes this on our behalf under its own privacy policy.

Google Analytics 4 (cookies, with your consent)

We also use Google Analytics 4 for a fuller picture, and it is controlled by Google Consent Mode. If you are visiting from the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area or Switzerland, it is off until you turn it on: a banner asks on your first visit, and until you accept, every measurement signal is held in a denied state and no analytics cookie is written. Elsewhere, where the law does not require prior consent, it runs by default and the same banner is your one-click way to turn it off. In both cases declining is one click, exactly like accepting, and nothing is stored beyond the answer itself, which we keep in your browser so we do not ask again. We use no advertising tags and set no advertising cookies anywhere.

When enabled, Google Analytics 4 sets cookies and uses online identifiers, and may collect information such as your approximate location, device and browser details, and the pages you visit. IP addresses are truncated/anonymised as part of Google Analytics processing. Google processes this data in accordance with its own privacy policy.

You can manage or refuse cookies in your browser settings, or use the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on.

Two convenience preferences are stored only in your browser’s local storage and are never sent to us or to anyone else: your size-unit choice (m² or ft²) and a short list of the areas you viewed most recently, which the home page shows back to you. Clearing your browser’s site data removes both.

5. Map tiles

Area pages carry a map, and its background tiles are drawn from OpenStreetMap data and served by CARTO. The map starts itself a moment after the page loads rather than waiting for a tap, so opening an area page sends a request to basemaps.cartocdn.com. That request carries your IP address and which part of the map you are looking at, as any image request would. It sets no cookie and we receive nothing back from it. Nothing else on the site contacts a third party for content: the fonts are served from this site, and the sale locations plotted on the map are built into this site’s own data files ahead of time. CARTO’s handling of that request is governed by CARTO’s privacy policy.

6. Server logs

Our hosting provider, Vercel, keeps standard server logs (such as IP address, request time and requested URL) for security and operational purposes. These logs are handled in accordance with Vercel’s privacy practices and are retained only for a limited time.

7. Property data is not personal data about you

The property sales figures displayed on RealScout are derived from public open data about properties, published by official bodies such as HM Land Registry. They relate to properties and sales, not to users of this website, and we do not combine them with any information about you.

Individual sale records (an address, a date and a price) come from HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, a public register published under the Open Government Licence, and we republish them as released, without adding names or any other information about the parties. Our lawful basis for doing so is legitimate interest in making already-public official data usable. If a recorded sale concerns you and you believe an entry is inaccurate, the correction route is HM Land Registry’s; if you have a concern about its appearance on this site, contact us at contact@materacapital.com and we will review it.

8. Your rights

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation you have the right to access, rectify or erase personal data we hold about you, to restrict or object to its processing, and to data portability. Since the product itself collects no personal data, these rights will in practice mostly concern analytics data. To exercise any right, contact us at contact@materacapital.com.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority, at ico.org.uk.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time, for example if we add new features or change providers. The current version will always be available on this page, with the date of the latest revision shown above.